Pages

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance Enhancements (vSphere 6.0)

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (vSphere FT) provides continuous availability for applications in the event of
physical server failures by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is always up to date with the
primary virtual machine. In the event of a hardware outage, vSphere FT automatically triggers failover, ensuring
zero downtime and preventing data loss. vSphere FT is easy to set up and configure and does not require any
OS-specific or application-specific agents or configuration. It is tightly integrated with vSphere and is managed
using vSphere Web Client.

Previous versions of vSphere FT supported only a single vCPU. Through the use of a completely new
fast-checkpointing technology, vSphere FT now supports protection of virtual machines with up to four vCPUs
and 64GB of memory. This means that the vast majority of mission-critical customer workloads can now be
protected regardless of application or OS.

VMware vSphere Storage APIs – VMware vSphere Data Protection™ can now be used with virtual machines
protected by vSphere FT. An in-guest agent is required to back up the previous version of vSphere FT.
vSphere FT 6.0 empowers vSphere administrators to use VMware Snapshot–based tools to back up virtual
machines protected by vSphere FT, enabling easier backup administration, enhanced data protection,
and reduced risk.

There have also been enhancements in how vSphere FT handles storage. It now creates a complete copy of
the entire virtual machine, resulting in total protection for virtual machine storage in addition to compute
and memory. It also increases the options for storage by enabling the files of the primary and secondary
virtual machines to be stored on shared as well as local storage. This results in increased protection,
reduced risk, and improved flexibility

In addition, improvements have been made to vSphere FT virtual disk support and host compatibility
requirements. Prior versions required a very specific virtual disk type: eager-zeroed thick. They also had very
limiting host compatibility requirements. vSphere FT now supports all virtual disk formats: eager-zeroed thick,
thick, and thin. Host compatibility for vSphere FT is now the same as for vSphere vMotion. This makes it much
easier to use vSphere FT.

More details:- http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMW-WP-vSPHR-Whats-New-6-0-PLTFRM.pdf